President-elect outlines key steps necessary to manage innovation and enterprise within universities
Monday 9 March 2009
Key steps need to be taken to manage scientific research enterprise within universities, says Lord May, President-elect of the British Science Association, and we should seize the current opportunity to develop new procedures for assessing and funding research to ensure we do this successfully.
These include avoiding hierarchical institutional structures and oppressive bureaucracies, encouraging risk taking, making sure good science is not hindered by institutional or disciplinary rigidities, and above all creating systems – based on peer-reviewed excellence – where young people are set free to express themselves.
Lord May will make his comments tonight as he gives an Address at the University of Surrey for National Science and Engineering Week. In September, the University will be hosting the British Science Festival, where Lord May will take up his position as President of the British Science Association.
He believes the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) had become more and more burdensome and bureaucratic, promoting behaviours that didn’t always best serve research excellence but instead played to the rules of the game.
‘Now that the last RAE has taken place, we need to ensure that whatever replaces it is fit for purpose in a climate where numbers pursuing a tertiary education are increasing faster than faculty positions, and money available for research has not increased in step with the numbers chasing it,’ he says.
He cites certain things that should be avoided: ‘The restriction in the last RAE that no two members of the same department could submit the same (jointly authored) paper was surreal. Imagine the discussions between Watson and Crick, had the RAE been around then!’
He also speaks out against the formulaic rigidity of the existing process, the structure that tends to work against encouraging multidisciplinary collaboration, and the fact that RAE status became ‘a totem of merit, overshadowing equally important measures of teaching quality’. This is something he sees as an unfortunate unintended consequence of a basically sensible idea.
‘Combined with a growing bureaucracy masquerading as accountability in universities, I saw this effect of the RAE as devaluing commitment to teaching in active universities,’ he adds.
Nor does he think that the requirement within Research Council grant application forms for a two-page ‘impact summary’ that highlights the potential financial or social effects of the research is a good idea, but rather an example of ‘silly box ticking’.
‘It is good that researchers in universities and elsewhere are encouraged to unleash their creative talents in carrying knowledge to markets. We need to do a better job of this. But in so doing, we must be careful not to undermine the thing the UK has traditionally been really good at – fundamental, blue skies, curiosity-driven research.’
National Science and Engineering Week is coordinated by the British Science Association in partnership with the Engineering and Technology Board (ETB) and funded by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS).
Media Enquiries
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